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Thursday, 21 May 2009

Mahmoud "Mick" Hawi walked free from jail yesterday after raising $200,000 bail - and celebrated with a kiss for his expectant wife.The Comanchero bikie gang president emerged from Silverwater Correctional Facility just before 3pm after spending five days in solitary confinement waiting for friends to raise the surety.A female friend managed to raise the bail after mortgaging her home as security.Hawi is charged with affray over his alleged involvement in the Sydney airport brawl with Hells Angels, in which Anthony Zervas, 27, died.As he waited more than three hours for his release, Hawi was met by up to a dozen family, friends and Comanchero members who later gathered to celebrate at his Bexley home.Seated in the back of a Silver Audi, with his heavily pregnant wife Carolina Gonzales in front, Hawi covered his face with a black and white hooded top as he was driven from the centre.Hawi was granted strict conditional bail in the Supreme Court last week after Ms Gonzales said she needed him at home for the birth of their child.The strict conditions forbid Hawi from attending the gang's Milperra clubhouse or associating with others involved in the airport brawl. He also must not leave his Bexley home between 8pm and 8am.While no further arrests have been made in relation to the brawl, police yesterday said they would monitor Hawi's movements ahead of his upcoming court appearance on May 28.

Red Scorpion gang member convicted last month of executing three people in the Surrey Six slayings has had two other sets of criminal charges he was facing stayed, a Crown spokesman confirmed Thursday.Neil MacKenzie said the prosecution team decided it would not be in the public interest to continue with other cases against Dennis Karbovanec, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the October 2007 killings in a Surrey highrise.Karbovanec’s surprise plea April 3 led to a life sentence with no parole eligibility for 15 years. Details of the sentencing were covered by an extraordinary ban on publication.At the time of the plea, Karbovanec was already facing several charges related to a handgun and silencer found in a secret compartment in his leased vehicle when he was stopped by Abbotsford police last October. He was wearing a body-proof vest at the time.Karbovanec was also arrested and charged in Port Coquitlam in March, along with Jonathan Bacon, with several fraud counts related to the leasing of a vehicle from Four Star Auto lease allegedly using fake documents.“Crown, in the circumstances, decided that it wasn’t in the public interest to proceed at this point with those outstanding matters,” MacKenzie said.He refused to say whether dropping the other charges was part of a plea agreement reached with Karbovanec. “I can’t really go into more detail than that,” he said. But MacKenzie said that generally-speaking Crown will consider staying charges when someone is already convicted of a more serious offence than the counts in the other cases.“It is factor Crown looks at generally as to whether the public interest requires proceeding. Any sentence imposed would end up being concurrent to the life sentence where a person has been convicted of murder,” MacKenzie said. “It is not unusual, but it doesn’t invariably happen.” Meanwhile, Bacon’s fraud charges have now been set for trial beginning Jan. 27, 2009, MacKenzie said. The day Kabovanec pleaded guilty in the Surrey Six case, Bacon’s younger brother Jamie and two other Red Scorpions – Matt Johnston and Cody Haevischer – were arrested and charged with first-degree murder in connection with the unprecedented gangland slaughter on Oct. 17, 2007.Jamie Bacon’s charges relate to the death of a young drug dealer Cory Lal in suite 1505 of the Balmoral Tower that day. Johnston and Haevischer are charged with killing Lal, his brother Michael, Eddie Narong, Ryan Bartolomeo and two innocent bystanders – Ed Schellenberg and Chris Mohan.A fifth unindicted co-conspirator has been identified in court papers only as Mr. X. Jamie Bacon, Haevischer and Johnston remain in custody pending their next appearance in Surrey provincial court June 15.

Rastrojos the armed wing of the Norte del Valle cartel surrendered in Choco province, near the border with Panama. They had been surrounded during a Colombian military operation that involved army and naval units. The Rastrojos had become such a big threat that President Alvaro Uribe declared them his main target. The men had formed a private army controlling a crucial part of the Pacific Coast in Choco province, a launch pad for cocaine leaving Colombia, the BBC's Jeremy McDemrott reports from Bogota. It is considered a major player in Colombia's illegal drugs trade, which accounts for exports of more than 600 tonnes of cocaine and heroin every year, our correspondent adds. The cartel is headed by Luis Enrique Calle, better know by his alias "Combatant". It is reported to have spread across the country, with groups of heavily-armed drugs traffickers now present all along the coast and the frontier with Ecuador.

Varrio Hawaiian Gardens gang members take pride in their racism and often refer to the VHG Gang as the 'Hate Gang,'" the main indictment states. "VHG gang members have expressed a desire to rid the city of Hawaiian Gardens of all African-Americans and have engaged in a systematic effort to achieve that result by perpetrating crimes against African-Americans."Latino street gang has waged a racist campaign to eliminate black people from a Southern California city through attempted murders and other crimes. Five indictments charged a total of 147 members and associates of the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens gang, and federal and local agencies arrested 63 of them by early Thursday, U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien told a press conference.O'Brien asserted it was "the largest gang takedown in United States history," but he did not immediately elaborate. The indictments detail attempted murder, kidnapping, firearms, narcotics and other charges related to attacks by the gang, which primarily operates in Hawaiian Gardens, a city of about 15,000 people in southeastern Los Angeles County. The indictment alleges a string of attacks on black residents, including a shooting into a home with eight people inside. The indictment does not say if anyone was hit. In another instance, two gang members allegedly chased a black man, yelled a racist epithet at him and then beat him with a garden rake. The same man was later repeatedly stabbed by two gang members, according to the indictment, which charges them with his attempted murder. In the 2000 Census, the latest data available, Hawaiian Gardens was roughly 73 percent Hispanic and 4 percent black. The city was incorporated in 1964 and, according to local lore, was named after a bamboo snack shack built in 1927. The indictments mark at least the second time in less than two years that federal authorities have alleged that Latino gang members in Southern California attacked black residents because of their race. In 2007, agents arrested dozens of members of the Florencia 13 gang in South Los Angeles and said the gang had, in some instances, killed black people purely because of the color of their skin. The extent to which race is driving the area's gang conflicts last year sparked an argument between the region's two top cops, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton. Baca said racial bias was a significant factor in gang crime while Bratton, pointing to statistics showing cross-racial crime to be rare, downplayed any tension. The investigation of the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens gang has been under way for almost four years since the June 2005 murder of Los Angeles County sheriff's Deputy Luis Gerardo "Jerry" Ortiz. Jose Luis Orozco, a member of the gang, was sentenced to death in 2007 for the killing. Ortiz, 35, died as he searched for Orozco, who had shot and wounded a man while he did yard work. Orozco was later found guilty of attempted murder in that case. "Following the murder of Deputy Ortiz, the Sheriff's Department sought federal and local assistance to help destroy the Hawaiian Gardens gang," the U.S. attorney said. Florencia 13 and Varrio Hawaiian Gardens aren't the only Latino gangs linked to racial attacks. In 2007, four members of The Avenues, a gang from the Highland Park area northeast of downtown Los Angeles, were convicted of hate crimes for killing a black man in what prosecutors called a campaign to drive blacks from that neighborhood. Authorities have also announced a crackdown on the 204th Street gang following the killing of a 14-year-old black girl. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an author and racial commentator, said racial bias among gang members is high in transitioning neighborhoods where black residents are moving out and Latinos are moving in. "There is a deep-seated animosity between some Latino gangs and African-Americans," he said. "There is no way around it, it is driven by racial animus."

Giovanni Strangio, the Calabrian mafia boss suspected of organising a massacre in Germany in 2007, has been extradited to Italy from The Netherlands. Escorted by Interpol agents, he arrived at Rome's Ciampino military airport and was transferred to the Italian capital's high-security Rebibbia prison.Strangio is believed to have masterminded and led the massacre of six members of a rival crime family in Duisburg in western Germany on 15 August 2007. A Dutch court last week approved Strangio's extradition to Italy. Strangio, 30, was arrested in the Netherlands in March, with another of Italy's 30 most wanted criminals, his brother-in-law Francesco Romeo.Investigators believe Strangio played a key role in the Duisburg massacre in revenge for the killing of his cousin, Maria Strangio, on Christmas Day 2006.A four-man hit squad from the southern Italian town of San Luca, home of the feuding clans linked to the Calabrian mafia or 'Ndrangheta, allegedly gunned down the six men outside a pizzeria.Another brother-in-law of Strangio's, Giuseppe Nirta, was arrested in Amsterdam last November and extradited to Italy earlier this year.Italian and German police both issued warrants for Strangio's arrest over the Duisburg killings. Prosecutors in the western German town of Bochum had also issued an international warrant for Strangio's arrest in relation to a robbery in Germany in July 1998.The feud between the Nirta-Strangio clan and the rival Pelle-Vottari clan was reportedly provoked by an egg-throwing incident in 1991 in the Calabrian town of San Luca, home of the two families.The 2007 massacre generated worldwide concern about the Calabrian-based 'Ndrangheta's international reach.The 'Ndrangheta has become one of the most powerful criminal organisations in Italy and is reported to have extended its power base through the European drug trafficking market.It has links to South American drug cartels and criminal organisations in Canada, Australia and other parts of the world.

Thursday, 14 May 2009

Charged 17-year old Eduardo Escobar with seven counts, including felony assault and armed criminal action.The shooting happened Monday afternoon in the 1000 block of Cleveland Avenue.According to court documents, the victim was shot inside a car as Escobar walked across the street. Police say Escobar unzipped his jacket, and opened fire.The bullet pierced the front passenger side door before hitting the victim in the abdomen.He was taken to the hospital, where his condition was not being released.Escobar was in the Jackson County jail late Wednesday afternoon.

Monday, 11 May 2009

Sandie Dave, 61, was found battered and stabbed to death at a recycling plant on the Gold Coast, while his wife Susan, 50, was found stabbed and butchered six miles from her husband's body. The owner of a security firm, Sandie was investigated in 2006 after four guns, including two Smith and Wessons, were stolen from his business. At the time the police investigated the victim because the weapons were reported stolen from the wrong address to which they were licensed. Detective Superintendent Dave Hutchinson said he believed they were hunting for more than one person. Playing down the link with biker gang warfare that has recently blighted Australia and other countries, Hutchinson said: "No connection has been established between these offences and any outlaw motorcycle gang. But we're keeping an open mind."

Sunday, 10 May 2009

The postmortem room at the Spanish Town Hospital, outside Kingston, typically has no refrigeration. So what might serve as evidence disintegrates fast. Bodies are brought in by the commercial funeral homes in the early morning, and piled up in corners. The pathologists rarely get to them before midday, if at all.

Annual murder rate of around 1,500, Jamaica is one of the world's most violent countries, on a par with South Africa and Colombia. A recent report by Amnesty International, "Let Them Kill Each Other" (April 2008), depicted a nation in tragic disorder. Stories of child labour, domestic violence and murder clog the national press. Kingston, the capital, remains locked in cycles of political and gangland violence; to live there today calls for special qualities of endurance.

In downtown Kingston, amid the shacks of Trench Town, the inhabitants are sullen and numbed. The neighbourhood was developed in the 1940s by the colonial administration to accommodate West Indian troops returning home. It has decayed into a violent, disaffected ghetto, whose tenement yards gave rise to the term "Yardie", shorthand for Jamaican gangland criminal. In Trench Town, gang members carry ever more lethal weapons to "rank" themselves higher in the narcotics trade. It might have been dangerous for me to visit on my own, so I was accompanied by a local pastor, Bobby Wilmot, whose job is to broker truces between gang factions. We drove across scrubland, the morning hot and shadowless, while dogs slunk amid a roadside litter of plastic bottles and old KFC boxes. At an abandoned remand centre with collapsed razor-wire fencing, the pastor said: "I've seen quite a few shoot-outs here in my time, and it looks like the cowboy shows are still running." A crowd of women had emerged by a roadblock of burning tyres. One of them, flushed with rage, shouted out: "Pastor B!" I quickly put away my notebook (it gave me a provocatively official air), while Pastor Bobby slowed down and addressed the woman through the car window. "Wha gwaan?" We soon found out. A youth from an adjacent turf had been executed – summarily – that morning by police; now another had been killed. By the police? No, a rival gang. The roadblock was to prevent retaliatory drive-by shootings. "Lord 'ave mercy," said Pastor Bobby. Violence is now so deeply ingrained in the local culture of "respect" that to be in charge, you have to "batter" people. As in parts of London, youths are caught in "district-code" warfare, where turfs are respected on pain of death. In some respects, 21st-century Jamaica, with its mass poverty, social resentments and skewed distribution of wealth, is like pre-Revolution France, reckoned Pastor Bobby. Only, in Jamaica, there is no sign of a revolutionary movement, no glimmer even of organised social protest. "So the wealthy will have nothing to fear," he said. "The poor are too disorganised, too ill-educated, for social revolution." There is, however, something far worse: thousands of empty, wasted lives, and endemic violence, in which God is a US-import Glock. ' In the half-century since independence in 1962, hopes for a fairer, better Jamaica have not been met. Instead, a system of "clientism" has evolved, in which patron politicians provide their client supporters with jobs, protection and a flow of money, as well as narcotics and firearms in return for their loyalty. Incredibly, an estimated 55 per cent of Jamaica's goods are imported from the US; these include not only sugar, cars and electrical goods, but guns. America's liberal gun laws have fatally eased the transfer of firearms into Jamaica. (Conversely, many Caribbean drug kingpins in Brooklyn – "Little Jamaica" – were apprenticed in the Kingston ghetto.) Carolyn Gomes, director of the human-rights group Jamaicans for Justice, believes the violent American culture of "respect" has flourished in Jamaica in the absence of civic values, encouraging teenagers to pursue power and money for their own sake. "When your life's so degraded," she said, "you need people to respect you." She added: "A youth with a gun is a youth to be feared and looked up to – murder is his badge of honour." Increasingly, Jamaica's justice system is undermined by violence and threats of violence. Pathologists are often too frightened to serve as observers at postmortems. They may be seen as witnesses or, worse, informers and suffer violence themselves. Jamaica is now a quasi-American outpost in the Caribbean, yet its legal system is clogged with British Empire-era red tape. The island's anti-sodomy laws, which carry a jail sentence of up to 10 years, derive from the English Act of 1861, and show to what a dismal extent Jamaica has absorbed values from its imperial masters. Similarly, the death penalty is still on the Jamaican statute books, though most capital punishments are overturned in London by the Privy Council, Jamaica's Court of Final Appeal. Thus an ancient British institution comprised of mostly white Law Lords has become the unlikely defender of human rights in Jamaica. A majority of Jamaicans – not just conservative, pro-monarchy ones – see hanging as the only effective deterrent against criminality: murderers must face death. Yet the British Law Lords, through the grace of Queen Elizabeth II, use their power to prevent executions. Such paradoxes are part of the Jamaican confusion: Victorian standards that have long disappeared in Britain linger on in Jamaica – to Jamaica's detriment. As elsewhere in the West Indies, Jamaica is a land with a continuous memory of slavery and slavish abasement. The deeper I ventured into the island, the more it seemed an insidious "shadism" has ensured that a minority of white (or near-white: what Jamaicans call "local white") inhabitants still control the plantations and other industries. Jamaica's oldest sugar estate, Worthy Park, was founded in 1670, and is still in operation. One day I went there for lunch. A sound of cocktail-making – a clinking of crushed ice against glass – greeted my arrival as bow-tied waiters hurried to whisk away flies from our plates. The elite of Jamaica's sugar industry was enjoying fine French wine and chilled soursop juice. They ate well – steak, lobster mayonnaise – and the food was served with a plantation-bred obsequiousness. Many of the guests turned out to be related; all were white. For more than three centuries, Jamaica had been Britain's most profitable sugar bowl, a prize and inhumane possession. Worthy Park's slave-grown sugar, destined for the docks and refineries of Liverpool and Bristol, used to be king. No longer: sugar is a dying industry throughout the Caribbean, and Worthy Park is waiting on a government promise of money, otherwise it will not survive. The only time Jamaica prospered economically was during the sugar boom of slavery in the 18th century. Nevertheless, Jamaicans had found a sense of hope in the 1970s when a leftist (and outwardly anti-American) government sought to instil self-respect in the black majority and rid them of the servility ingrained by slavery. Social reforms were implemented but, 30 years on, the island's class and racial divides are still in place. "Motty" Perkins, a controversial Kingston radio journalist, reckons the attitude to power in Jamaica remains that of the plantation system, where every little Trench Town Napoleon wants to be an overseer with a team of servants. "Man, I tell you, the Jamaicans who live in the big houses today – black, brown, yellow, white – they despise those niggers down there, the Trench Town poor." Imperial Britain did some terrible things in Jamaica, Perkins agreed, "but whoever said we have a fair society now?" Politicians exploit the poor for their own purposes, in a pattern stretching back through the 300 years of British slavery. Jamaica's very social order betrays its slaving past. Near Montego Bay, I met an elderly sugar planter and land-owner known to the locals as "Squire Taylor". His Georgian residence was shuttered and silent in the afternoon heat; the door was opened by a black man in dungarees. "Master Taylor's asleep," he announced, "but he soon come." Taylor emerged from his slumbers, a thin man bent almost double with age, yet still every inch the "buckra", or white sugar boss. He gestured for me to sit down in a room whose scant furniture was eaten, visibly, by termites. Taylor's daughter had come out the other day from England with a removal van, he explained, and, staking a claim to the family heirlooms, "cleared out everything". Taylor added (apparently by way of apology) that she lived in Tunbridge Wells. The Taylors had occupied this merchant's house since 1773 and, no doubt, like many of Jamaica's long-settled English, they were impervious to, and contemptuous of, African slave culture. Taylor began to rail against the native propensity (as he construed it) for idleness and skylarking. His family slaves had been "awfully lazy"; they rarely did an honest day's work. Honest? Jamaican slavery, with its arsenal of whips and chains, was, by contrast, brute mercantile greed. Upstairs, the rooms had collapsed; a mattress lay along one wall, next to a bucket for collecting rain. The house, like Jamaica's sugar industry, was on shaky foundations. More so even than tourism, narcotics have transformed Jamaica. Kingston remains vital to the trans-shipment of cocaine from Latin America to the markets in North America and – the most profitable of all markets – Britain. Cocaine fetches three times as much in Britain as in other European countries. More than 300 Jamaican women are currently serving sentences in British prisons for drug smuggling, many of them single mothers. The drugs come in by air as well as by ship. "Mules" board planes at Kingston and Montego Bay, having ingested up to 100 condoms or (more dependably sturdy) surgical glove fingers filled with cocaine. I spent an afternoon at Kingston's container terminal, Port Bustamante, watching vessels unload. Stockpiles of containers – P&O, Hamburg Süd – were stacked like giant Lego blocks along the wharves, among them "reefers" (refrigerated containers) crammed with frozen fish fingers and TV dinners. Omar Williams, chief of the port's anti-narcotic security, was carrying a pair of binoculars and a licensed firearm. He was on the look-out, he explained, for "high-risk" containers from Colombia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. X-ray equipment installed in 2006 by US security experts works only intermittently because "certain employees keep pulling the plug" on the cargo-scanning equipment; Jamaica's "guns for drugs" trade with Haiti is thought to be facilitated in this way. "Shouldn't Jamaica tighten its border controls?" I asked Williams. "You could say that. But it's not just Jamaica. American guns are dropping into Kingston like mangoes off a tree." He answered my next question – about where exactly the guns come from – with a slight weariness. "We really don't know. Some say Haiti – as payment for drugs. Others say the Balkans. Maybe Manchester. Maybe Liverpool. Maybe Northern Ireland." Like any other globalised economy, in other words, the guns come from all over the world. They are cheap, and getting cheaper; and to the new breed of Jamaican criminal who uses them, so is human life.

On my last day, I went to Watercourse, a village so insignificant it fails to appear on any map. Even the name is misleading, as there are no watercourses in the area and, as far as anyone knows, there never have been. Thelma Smith, a Jamaican living in Brixton, south London, had urged me to visit. Thelma was born in Watercourse in 1923 and had relatives there; her childhood friend Benita Hailey was among them.

"Thelma sent you?" asked Miss B (Hailey's local name). I said yes, and she pointed me to a chair on the porch. "Sit down and relax yourself." A neighbour pegging out the washing looked at me curiously, while children's voices were raised in playful chatter somewhere. Watercourse was a hillside community of perhaps 800 inhabitants, situated near Kingston in the heart of orange-grove country.

"Yes, up here is country," Miss B said, pouring me a glass of coconut water, "and we country people is a good people who care for each other." The air, cool with a smell of juniper and orange, was a tonic to the fug of traffic-polluted Kingston. The world that Miss B had known as a girl, however, was falling around her; Kingston represented a confusion beyond the reach of reason, a creation of the devil. What used to be considered a crime there was now judged a non-crime – even murder. "But we're living in Jamaica, my dear, and we have to stay here now. Yes, we have to live," and I admired her for the attitude. How could you live in a country in a state of constant preparedness for the worst? With a sigh, Miss B got up and led me by the arm to a shaded plot of earth where, under an orange tree, the gravestones of Thelma Smith's parents stood alone in the fading light. She reached up to the tree and pulled down one, two, then six oranges for me. "When you get home to Brixton," she said, dropping the fruit into my bag, "tell Thelma that Miss B give you some oranges – and kiss up your children for me." That moment in Watercourse, with the sun descending over a secluded cemetery, and the green-lighted fireflies which had begun to dance over the graves of Mr and Mrs Smith, defined for me the survival of an older Jamaica. The island is beautiful; yet the Jamaican people, with their gift for humour and generosity, their creativity (and fabled aggression) are stuck in a post-colonial malaise. Independence arrived late – 14 years after India's – and by the time it came in 1962, the enthusiasm for change had been tempered by years of colonial prevarication. "Now of course Jamaica's gone to the American camp," Michael Foot, the Labour politician, told me in 2007. "And it's partly our fault – we've abandoned Jamaica." Having shaped Jamaica's past for ill, Britain had not helped to shape its future for good. Yet, in the present uncertainty and emptiness, surely there is some possibility of hope, maybe even of a new beginning? Jamaica, a nation built on violence, remains a corrupted Eden haunted by the legacy of imperialism. The many wonderful things about the island – its extraordinary music-making, the physical beauty, its athletic prowess (six gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, including, famously, Usain Bolt's) – are shadowed now by crime and political corruption. Hope has not died, yet I was in no hurry to go back.

Police arrested Raymond John Garcia, 24; Ernesto Guadalupe Ruiz Esparza, 19; and Ralph Anthony Garcia, 21 — all San Jose residents.They were arrested on April 23, 25 and 29 respectively, according to officer Garcia. He did not know specifically why police waited to announce the information until Thursday.The arrests stem from the death of Enrique Flores on April 17, as he walked from his house about 10 p.m. to a market near Almaden Expressway and Foxworthy Avenue. His girlfriend, Nancy Nieto, said he went out to buy beer, and chips for their daughter, who is a kindergartner at Schallenberger Elementary School. He never came home.According to police, Flores had no known relation to the suspects. Police had originally said the killing was not gang-related, but Thursday, Garcia said the motive does appear to be gang-related."I think he was there at the wrong time," Nieto said. "It makes me feel much better that they've been arrested."According to Nieto, Flores came to the United States from Mexico when he was 21, and was a mover for Graebel Relocation Services. She said he was the family's sole provider. The two had been together for seven years.

world-first declaration against members of the Finks motorcycle gang.It may do so under controversial new laws aimed at curbing bikie criminal activity.Premier Mike Rann on Sunday confirmed that Attorney General Michael Atkinson was considering an application from South Australian police to have a declaration issued against members of the gang.According to the Sunday Mail newspaper, 42 gang members are the subject of the application, with the declaration likely to occur this week."The Finks are thugs," Mr Rann told journalists in Adelaide."Members of the Finks have got criminal records involving drugs and violence and illegal firearms and everything else longer than any arm that anyone's ever seen."... I'm looking forward to the outcome of the deliberations of the Attorney General."Under the Serious and Organised Crime (Control) Act gang members can be officially "declared" in Parliament and then become subject to a control order which can restrict their contact with nominated people and places.According to the Sunday Mail, the orders are aimed at stopping Finks gang members freely associating and planning or conspiring to commit crime.Mr Rann said a declaration under the legislation would be a world-first."The legislation, which is extremely controversial, has now been followed by New South Wales and the Northern Territory," he said."My plea today is for all of the states in Australia to follow SA, NSW and NT so there are no safe havens for criminal bikie gangs anywhere in Australia."

17-year-old man has been killed as part of a a six-week dispute between two gangs in Columbia.Police say a member of a rival gang shot Sintray Bell twice in the head as he drove by in a car with other gang members early Friday morning.Authorities say Bell's fellow gang members left his body in the vehicle and fled. Investigators arrested 22-year-old Cola Taylor several hours later and charged him with murder.Authorities say the rival gangs have been shooting at each other for several weeks, but this is the first time someone has been struck.Taylor remains in the Richland County jail. It wasn't immediately clear if he had an attorney. Early Friday morning 17-year old gang member Sintray Bell was shot and killed while driving in a car with fellow gang members along the 900 block of Wilkes Road.Authorities say the suspected shooter, 22-year-old Fred Taylor, was part of a rival gang. We now know a war between the two gangs had been going on for six weeks. Authorities say the two gangs had been shooting at each other for weeks, but this was first time anyone was hit.

Ian "Blink" McDonald, 47, said the men who put the homemade bomb beneath his luxury car put children at risk. Police and army bomb disposal experts evacuated the block of flats where he lives and closed the street. McDonald said: "I've a very good idea who's behind this. "There are people who'd like to see me dead but I don't understand why they put the lives of others at risk to hurt me. "Children play outside my flat all the time. Women walk by with their babies in buggies."The police told me they think the device would've taken half my building away."The guys who planted this bomb obviously know where I live so why didn't they come to my door or wait on me leaving the flat? They don't have the guts."They'd rather sneak about in the middle of the night and act like daft wee boys playing with big toys."I could've jumped in that car and blown myself into a million pieces but I could've taken two or three others with me." A gas canister wired to a battery was discovered under McDonald's Mercedes Kompressor after two hooded men - thought to be linked to a gangland feud - had been spotted at his car in the early hours of the morning.A neighbour saw a silver estate car drive into the cul-de-sac near Hogganfield Loch in Riddrie, Glasgow, at around 5am on Friday.She called police because she thought they were trying to steal McDonald's car, which has the registration B1LNK.Officers arrived but left without noticing anything suspicious.McDonald only became aware of the bomb when a neighbour battered on his door at 8.30am.McDonald is a former friend of gangster Paul Ferris and worked for the late Glasgow godfatherArthur Thompson Snr. He was caged for 16 years in 1992 for a bungled s36million bank robbery in Torquay.His friends include Paisley gangster Grant Mackintosh and the McGovern crime clan.McDonald said: "If planting a bomb under my car is the worst I've got to worry about then I don't have a problem."On Friday night I went out for a drink with pals then ate a pizza. I'll do the same tonight - that's how scared I am." Detectives yesterday sealed off the cul-de-sac for a second time and carried out a fingertip search.Strathclyde Police said: "The device has been taken away for examination. This incident is being treated seriously."

Tuesday, 5 May 2009

On Friday, a woman on 4th Avenue Court was shot buy a man police say is a gang member. Two other men involved in this case also have ties to the Bloods. That night there was a shooting on Dodds Avenue. Police say the victim in this case was shot in the arm and showed up at Parkridge Hospital. They say he's also a member of the Bloods.Weary says other shootings involving at least six other men and other shootings were the ones investigators were tipped about. They've been investigating three gangs: Gangster Disciples, Crips and Bloods. Crime Supression Unit investigators are continuing to identify and locate others that may possibly be involved in the series of shooting incidents.

Everyone's worried it could explode at the funeral.The Bloods and GIB have been warring since at least May 2006, when one man was shot and wounded after a GIB member caught him handing out stolen GIB sweatshirts, sources said.Police on high alert Tuesday during the funeral of a woman gunned down in a Rockaways gang shooting, police sources said Monday.Police from a number of different units - including the Gang Division, Narcotics, the Queens South Task Force and Community Affairs - will be on hand when Melissa Williams, 28, is mourned at St. John's Baptist Church on Rockaway Beach Boulevard, sources said. There will be a two-hour viewing at the church, followed by the funeral.Williams was an associate of GIB, Get It In Bricks - a reference to bricks of cocaine - police sources said. The man charged in her shooting, Nigel Vasser, also 28, is a Bloods member with a sect known as HRG Blood, for Hood Related Gangster, sources said.Sources said the NYPD is concerned about a showdown between the two gangs.The NYPD is so worried it even notified New Jersey State Police because Williams will be buried in Morganville, N.J., at the Forest Green Park Cemetery, and it is not unusual for rival gangs to confront each other graveside, sources said.Williams, who lived in Hempstead, was shot in the head during a confrontation in front of the Hammel Houses the evening of April 23. Struck once in the head, she was rushed to Peninsula Hospital Center in Far Rockaway in critical condition.Vasser was arrested later that night by detectives from the 100th Precinct, charged with attempted murder and ordered held without bail.Williams died last Saturday after her family took her off life support, police said. Her death was reclassified a homicide, and Queens prosecutors will ask a grand jury to indict Vasser on murder charges, sources said.The funeral alert is based, sources said, on what police officers and detectives have been hearing during recent prisoner debriefings, as well as conversations with a number of informants. "Everyone's worried it could explode at the funeral," said one police source familiar with the alert.

Sunday, 3 May 2009

Joseph Randay and Dilsher Gill, both 18, were reportedly kidnapped at gun-point from a city park at dinner time Thursday by a car-borne assailant, Amarjit Randay, father of the one of the slain teenagers, told the media. Their bodies were discovered inside the abandoned car on a rural road Friday.Two Indo-Canadian teenage boys were killed in gang-style violence at Abbotsford near here Friday. Abbotsford is home to one of the largest Punjabi communities in Canada.Randay said his son Joseph and Gill were hanging out with their school mates in the park when the assailant pulled up to them. He said his son confronted the assailant when he tried to kidnap two other teenagers by pointing his gun at them.“All we know is that they were kidnapped at gunpoint (last night) and now they have found their bodies. The police said they are both dead…police have no leads,” the grieving father was quoted as saying by the local media.Both the teenagers were grade 12 students at the local W.J. Mouat Secondary School.Known for its oldest Sikh shrine of North America which has been put on the heritage list by the Canadian government, Abbotsford lies almost on the US border. It is also known as the theft capital of Canada because of its high property crime rate.Because of the free availability of marijuana which is traded with cocaine in the US, many Indo-Canadian teenagers in the Vancouver have been sucked into drug gangs over the years.Shootings betweens these gangs have claimed the lives of more than 110 lives of Indo-Canadian young people since the mid-1990s. Most cases remained unsolved.Though the provincial British Columbia government has set up a task force to stem the violence, it shows no signs of abating.

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